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Twitter reveals what you eat and why

By Staff, Relaxnews

Updated:
08/29/2013 05:00:28 AM MDT

U.S. researchers are using Twitter as a tool to helping us understand not only what we eat but why. (Kzenon/shutterstock.com)

There are a lot of reasons why you eat something. Hunger is certainly a factor, but so is convenience. Now, U.S. researchers are using Twitter as a tool to helping us understand not only what we eat but why.

In a new study, University of Arizona professor Melanie Hingle and her team set out to determine whether the social networking site could be used to capture, in real time, information about people's dietary choices and what's behind their choices. The main driving motivators, according to the findings, were cost and convenience.

"This helps us understand what is driving eating behavior, and that's important from a healthy eating program standpoint," Hingle said. "If I am going to develop a program to promote healthy eating to people, I want to know what motivates them to engage in their current eating behavior so I can tailor that program appropriately."

In the research, 50 adult volunteers, ranging in ages from 18 to 30, were given study-specific Twitter accounts and asked to "tweet" everything they ate or drank in real time for three consecutive days. Subjects also chose from a list of 24 provided hashtags to categorize the types of food they were eating and their reason for eating it, and were asked to post photos of their meals.

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After collecting the data, researchers used a computer program to visually map the correlations between what was being eaten and the reasons why.

"We were able to visualize relationships between eating behaviors and reasons for those behaviors in a novel way we haven't really done before," Hingle said. "That allowed us to really see that there are, in fact, relationships, and those relationships do seem to align with the ones in the literature, which shows that convenience and cost are among the main motivators."

"It's good to raise awareness about your habits since a lot of eating behavior is unconscious or really habitual," Hingle added. "You tend to get in your groove and not get out of it, so this kind of shakes that up and makes you think about what's influencing you. It can help you develop new habits or just become aware of the ones that are not doing you any good."

But this isn't the only way scientists are using Twitter to better understand human behavior and how it impacts health. Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York are also using the social media site to track how factors such as social status, exposure to pollution and even taking the bus or going to the gym influence one's health. By following thousands of Twitter users in New York, many of whom sent tweets that were location tagged, over a period of a month, researchers were able to estimate interactions between users and their environment.